AUTHOR=Huang Jinqing , Su Jian , Cheng Tengfei 
  
TITLE=IRMKD: an application of instance relation matrix in plant disease recognition
  
JOURNAL=Frontiers in Bioinformatics
  
VOLUME=Volume 6 - 2026
  
YEAR=2026
  
URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/bioinformatics/articles/10.3389/fbinf.2026.1761574
  
DOI=10.3389/fbinf.2026.1761574
  
ISSN=2673-7647
  
ABSTRACT=BackgroundThe recognition and prevention of plant diseases is very important to the growth process. At present, neural networks have achieved good results in plant disease identification, but the development of convolutional neural networks has brought a large number of network parameters and long recognition time, which greatly limits its application on devices that lack computing resources.MethodsTo solve this problem, We introduce a novel approach, dubbed instance-relation-matrix based knowledge distillation (IRMKD), that transfers mutual relations of data examples. For concrete realizations of IRMKD, we combine the correlation of the samples with the relationship between the characteristics of the instances and introducing multiple loss functions.ResultsExperimental results show that the proposed method improves educated student models with a significant margin. In particular, for traditional neural networks, our method significantly reduces memory usageand recognition time by an average of 92% and at the same time ensure that the recognition accuracy rate is above 93%, provides a new plant disease recognition method for devices with limited memory and computing resources.ConclusionIRMKD can significantly reduce the volume of the model and improve the recognition speed of the model on the premise of slightly reducing the accuracy of the verification set.